Washington High school has annual STEM advisory board meetings in which our stakeholders meet and give feedback regarding our STEM program. In addition, our school hosts several cluster meetings throughout the school year to evaluate our STEM program alignment with our feeder schools. This is imperative to improve the quality of our neighborhood schools. Our cluster teams include teachers, administrators, support staff, students, parents and community members. The cluster model allows us to provide more support, opportunity and equity, as well as creates strategies that increase student performance.  At these meetings we discuss student achievement, pathway offerings, staffing needs for STEM instruction, as well as STEM enrichment opportunities for students.

 

We also use these meetings to evaluate how we are supporting STEM instruction as students transition from middle school to high school. Due to much feedback from our cluster and stakeholder meetings many revisions have been implemented to ensure the courses, internship opportunities, and STEM access to all students is rigorous and equitable. Most recently we saw the need to do more reflecting upon our STEM curriculum and instructional methods. So we decided that it would be in our best interest to survey the faculty to gauge their overall attitude in regards to STEM initiatives. The survey of the teachers addressed the current understanding of the STEM process, positives and negatives of implementation, and the number of STEM experiences teachers provide their students. The results showed that 53% of the faculty provided more experiences currently than in recent years.

 

Opportunities for Growth

We do recognize the need to plan appropriate professional development to address the areas of concerns and focus on STEM instructional practices. We also want to ensure we have a greater social media presence to ensure all stakeholders stay up to date and knowledgeable regarding our STEM success and revisions toward improvement.